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The Relateds

The Indian Ocean might sound like it is India's, but it is certainly not. It is, in fact, a battlefield every day where the Indian Navy has been doing everything to secure its territory from the country's assertive neighbours.

Headlines Today made a trip to the middle of a war being silently fought in the Indian Ocean. India's battle headquarters for the Indian Ocean region sits on the country's most strategically located outlying territory -- the Andaman & Nicobar Islands -- that are well-known and little known at the same time.

Mysterious and strategic and located closer to Indonesia than to India, these islands form a protective shield to the Indian mainland. It is around these 572 islands that the Indian Navy has begun to build a formidable barrier of strength, a barrier that an array of insidious forces tries to penetrate every single day.

Headlines Today's cameras, allowed to film and participate in a gruelling maritime exercise, got an inside view of the tireless efforts that go into keeping Indian territory unmolested. Sitting on the mainland, it is near impossible to fathom the threats that bear down upon India's sovereign island territories. For all the strength that India possesses, these deeply strategic territories are surprisingly vulnerable.

An assertive China does not only wants India's mountain states. In fact, the legendary Chinese threat in and around Andaman & Nicobar islands is no exaggeration. It is more covert, more sinister than the aggression it displays along the line of actual control.

It is no secret that Beijing is rapidly building military infrastructure at Coco Island, a part of Myanmar and a short boat-ride away from India's northernmost island in the chain. The Chinese are also known to be building an airbase on Coco, an extremely sensitive proposition for Indian security.

The placid waters of the Andaman Sea belie the 24/7 threat perception that churns these waters on literally a daily basis. A war in the conventional sense might be a remote, forbidding notion, but that does not mean that the Indian Navy and the two other services do not practice for any eventuality. Threat perceptions even account for battle in these waters.

India has always been deeply uncertain about China's long term intentions. And, with a hugely bigger maritime force at its disposal, China's strategic reach in the Indian Ocean leaves no territory without the pall of threat.

The remoteness of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands also makes them a petri dish for unusual jointness between the navy and its two sister services that operate on air and land. Port Blair, the capital of these island territories, is home to India's largest tri-services area command, the Andaman & Nicobar Command, which celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier in 2011.

Its peculiar profile, hard-pressed resources and a forbiddingly expansive area of responsibility makes it one of the most dedicated command formations on Indian soil and, more often than not, Indian water.

Filming security drills on these islands also affords one of the rarest sights in the Indian military, the navy's elite Marine Commandos or MARCOS. No TV crew has ever filmed these fearsome commandos so closely before. Their faces remained covered because their identities must be protected at all costs. A unit of these special forces operate out of Port Blair and are available for literally any kind of operation.

Even against the Chinese threat around these islands, these commandos are a formidable first and last line of offence.

The island territories make for an extremely useful Indian listening post for the larger Indian Ocean region. But the remoteness of these islands itself represents the biggest threat to them. There is no reason to believe that forces inimical to Indian interests and sovereignty do not have designs on these islands to spy on them and the many sensitive installations they house.

In August 2011, a Chinese vessel camouflaged as a fishing trawler was spotted by the navy just off the Andaman Islands. Indian authorities concluded that the mysterious visitor was on a spy mission and was most likely being commanded by personnel of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA's) intelligence units.

Grave uncertainties surrounding China's maritime intentions in the Indian Ocean have engendered a singularly focused effort to beef up strength on the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. As a result, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands would be militarised to a much greater level over the next few years.

That includes 6,000 troops, more warships, more air bases and more docking facilities for warships. In addition, the air force would base a detachment of fighters almost permanently on the islands for the maritime interdiction and anti-shipping role.

The strategic location of these islands has more to do with just sovereignty. The navy's endless watch is not just about protecting territories. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands straddle the busiest trade routes in the world and the onus on keeping them safe and sanitised is one of the chief responsibilities of the Indian Navy. But the irony is that international waters around these territories have to be kept safe in coordination with navies that include China's, an undoubted maritime adversary.

Considering just how much energy security matters to both India and China, securing the sea lines of communication is a fierce competition, one where confrontations are always just a whisker away. The passage of billions of dollars worth of trade does not discount another potential threat in the Bay of Bengal, one that the Indian Navy has become all too familiar with and in the Arabian Sea.

Earlier this year, a Special Task Force was mandated with the singular task of formulating a strategy that will convert the Andaman & Nicobar Islands into a fearsome military buffer specifically against Chinese designs.

The government has made some hard decisions following constant and sometimes thinly disguised probing by China. The country's military hub on the Coco Island has only aggravated the threat perception.

In a significant revelation, it became known recently that plans were also afoot to transform the Andaman and Nicobar Command into a massive hub for amphibious warfare, the fine art of intertwining maritime and land warfare at every level to achieve formidable operational effect.

The fact that an overwhelming percentage of these islands is uninhabited may appeal to environmentalists and the romantic. However, the navy has no choice but to be able to make its presence felt should the need arise. With few docking facilities and certainly no way for large ships to approach most islands, amphibious landing operations form the bedrock of the joint navy-army capability here. Without it, they would be at sea, and not just literally.

Landing operations are inherently controversial. The navy was once sensitive about such a capability and the perceptions that would follow. But like almost everything else in the Indian military, there is no choice. If the job has to be done, this is the way to do it.

No theatre of potential conflict typifies the three-dimensional nature of the Chinese threat than these islands do. And that is principally why the Indian forces have no choice but to get out of their comfort zone and operate in some of the most difficult tropical conditions.